This is us. This is on us. No one will rescue us.

[There is nothing more beautiful than a group of pelicans skimming just above coastal waters, calmly and majestically, at sunset. I have stood and watched a colony of pelicans in a Monterey inlet for hours at a time. This horrible destruction of nature cannot stand. -DS]

A mining disaster. An oil rig disaster. Honest working people killed just trying to make a living. Environmental devastation that is beyond our imagining, despite our imagining being based on truly terrifying scientific facts. There is no clean coal. There is no safe oil production. From those that suffer on the front lines of the extractive industries to all of nature suffering from the burning of what is extracted, this has to end. It has to end as soon as is possible. In the short term, that will mean much mutual sacrifice, but in the long term not only will it mean jobs, opportunities, and a new wave of economic growth, it will mean the possibility of a sustainable future for all humankind.

Even some right wing politicians now seem to be awakening to the specific dangers revealed by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. We must build on that awakening. Because it is but the merest glimpse, in the bruise light of dawn, of something so much larger, something so much more ominous, something so much more urgent and imminent. A future now cresting into being, while we stand dazed, oblivious, and distracted before the exigency of its inevitability. No matter how horrific the coming days, they are as nothing compared to those now careening toward us, just a bit behind.

We have to be rid of fossil fuels. We are junkies, and we are dying. We are killing not only ourselves, but so many of the beautiful and wondrous creatures with whom we share this spinning blue garden oasis. If a biosphere fails in a far corner of an obscure galaxy on a distant edge of what may be but one of countless Universes, will anybody hear? This is us. This is on us. No one will rescue us. There will be no redeeming such a catastrophic collective failure. Myths and fantasies will not save us.

This is 9/11. This is Katrina. Not in terms of immediate human impact, but in what it tells. This is larger than it seems. This is a statement about who we are and what we have become. This is a lesson about our own willful blindness, our callous disregard, our foolishness, our stumbling in mere semi-consciousness, as zombies through the cultural detritus that defines, numbs, and blinds us. If the overwhelming accumulation of science hasn’t been enough. If the changing migratory patterns of seabirds hasn’t been enough. The facts and our fellow creatures, screaming alarms that it takes considerably more effort to ignore than it would to heed.

We can’t drill ourselves out of this. We drilled ourselves into this. We can’t rely on miracles. Our reliance on miracles has been a symptom of the disease that has brought us to this precipice of global crisis. The decisions we now make, the decisions our elected leaders now make, will define our collective future as few decisions in history ever have. We may soon be beyond our decisions being able to make a difference.

George Carlin used to say that when you start experimenting with drugs, a door opens in your mind. But as you continue to experiment with drugs, that door closes again, you just don’t notice it. The burning of fossil fuels is our collective drug of choice. For a century, it opened doors. Those doors are closing. Will we catch them before they seal? Will we even hear them if the lock behind us, as the very air we breathe becomes a countdown of expiring existence?

You take away politics, take away whether you think trickle-down [economics] works, take away even what you think about race. Just look at this community. Are the families healthy and thriving? No? Okay. It's not resilient.

The agency's assessment of fracking fluid disclosure is part of its broader study on fracking and water—and spotlights the project's limitations.By Neela Banerjee Oil and gas companies refuse to disclose 10 percent of the hundreds of chemicals they use during hydraulic fracturing, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. […]

Two scientists from Columbia University launch a $40,000 pilot testing project in Pennsylvania they hope will lead to full-scale research.By David Hasemyer Frank Varano knows what's coming. His land near Williamsport, Pa., abuts property that has been leased for gas exploration––and he's certain it will be fracked. What is less certain is how that […]

If a new rule takes effect, about 95 percent of all pipelines would be subject to stricter safety testing because of their age, location and other factors.By Elizabeth Douglass It's been two years since a broken 1940s ExxonMobil pipeline flooded an Arkansas neighborhood with Canada's heaviest oil, and the ripple effects of the spill have made it to […]

(Reuters)The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. The U.S. submission, on Monday or Tuesday according to a White House official, adds to national strategies beyond 2020 already p […]

On March 2, motivational speaker Bob Lenz gave a presentation at Iron Mountain High School in Michigan... which might have been okay until he used the opportunity to promote an event he was hosting at a local church later that evening. This is the flyer he gave to students:And how did that evening event go? Well, he boasted about his conversions-to-Jesus aft […]

Gordon Klingenschmitt, the fundamentalist Christian and Colorado lawmaker, is finally getting a sort of punishment following his comments last week that the brutal attack of a pregnant woman occurred because we allow legal abortions in this country.He has now been pulled from one of the two committees on which he served:

How many religious references do we need to see from public school officials before we can all admit they've overstepped their bounds?Exhibit 1: Principal Albert Hardison's message on the website for Walnut Hill Elementary/Middle School in Louisiana, part of the Caddo Parish Public Schools:

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon→

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. ~Noam Chomsky

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman